Pocket USB hard drives are all the rage. One of the more attractive and reasonably priced offerings is the Iomega eGo. The drive packs 160GB of storage capacity into its red, chrome-accented frame. It’s shielded from tumbles and comes with a fine backup program—at least if you’re a Microsoft Windows user.

Designed to be economical, the eGo offers a better cost per gigabyte ($1) than many of its peers. Its hard drive yields decent performance, taking 54 seconds to copy our 1.2GB test folder, which is fast enough for backup or data transfer. The drive is rated to survive a fall of 51 inches—at least when it’s not plugged in and operating.

The eGo comes with a license for a good backup program, EMC’s Retrospect HD. Retrospect can protect both document folders and entire hard drives, including the operating system and applications. But the drawback is that you have to download the program from Iomega’s support site. Worse, it works only on Windows systems.

All in all, the eGo is a solid portable hard drive for storing and transporting your digital life. It should be on your short list if you’re looking for more storage for your laptop or home PC.